Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

The Limits of Public Work:
A Critical Reflection on
the “Engaged University”
Mary Stanley
This chapter is dedicated to the late Manfred Stanley,
dear husband, trusted colleague, and love of my life,
whose own work is my model of humane scholarship.
Peter Levine’s tale of two generations of scholars is one framework
for introducing the reader to the Higher Education Exchange.
It’s a good analysis of the whys, hows, and whos behind HEX. Levine’s
tale, like any effort to summarize a complex intellectual or activist
“movement,” is necessarily incomplete. Given its focus, it does not
address several deeply contentious and publicly known troubles
vexing higher education during the period that HEX emerged and
solidified a perspective on scholarship, the role of higher education
in a democracy and the nature of democracy.
Of course a volume such as this will present many opportunities
to explore those troubles as has HEX itself over the years of its
publication. My perspective on the environment in higher education
during the HEX years differs from Levine’s in two ways.
First, I disagree with his implied assertion that the public
sphere must privilege open-ended intellectual pluralism. Openness
to ideas as described by Levine, suggests to me that more theoretically
coherent or ideologically informed perspectives (or some
theoretically informed perspectives) are not welcome or are troubling
in the public sphere. To that I take issue. I would argue the contrary,
which given the scale of problems the public must confront, pragmatic
openness is simply inadequate. There are historical moments
when big abstract theories are required. No, not utopian claims or
closed ideologies uncoupled from experience but big ideas that
require a certain level of intellectual clarity, necessary abstraction,
sustained critical analysis, and transparency in terms of how power
might give unwarranted credence to some ideas recasting them as
common sense, while undermining others as “un-American.”
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